Bob.
I met Bob after I had spent the better part of an hour crawling around an unkempt strip of land that circled a high school's soccer pitch. Peppered with new life popping up in the late spring, I was exploring and photographing the wildflowers while my daughter, Dotti, practiced soccer with her team. Sneaking up on unsuspecting dandelions, I silently summoned my invisibility cloak, hopeful it would save my daughter from any embarrassment I might cause her. Earlier at drop off, some of the other mums mentioned they were going for a drink up the road and asked if I would like to join them. Club soccer is more than just a sport; it is a lifestyle. I spend more time with the mums and dads of my daughter's soccer club than I do with any other friends and family. It is the total opposite of the rest of my life, a fact that one of the mums pointed out one day when she remarked, " How does someone go from working on photo shoots to the sidelines of a suburban kids' soccer team?” Quite easily, as it turns out. I love it!
With many of us coming together with little to nothing in common, we find our sameness in idle, humorous chit chat, and a strong commitment to watching our littles kick a small pleather ball around a green rectangle while the clubs bleed our bank accounts dry! The club does not have a physical clubhouse, which means we spend many evenings driving around the state finding fields belonging to different schools. This can be exhausting and irritating, but it also means I get to see places I would not otherwise visit. Like anything in life, the choice of how we perceive this is the difference between love and hate. On evenings like this one, I loved it!
I had been examining a pale blue broken bird's egg on the ground when I looked up and saw a man wearing a neon t-shirt sitting on his tractor, smoking a cigarette, watching me. I nodded, he nodded back. With the pink light sneaking a warm arm around him, though, it was not long before the temptation to speak to him outweighed the charms of the little blue egg.
Finding out that Bob had been watching me leap around his grounds pulled us into an easy introduction about nature and animals. As a custodian at this high school for over seven years, he spends many of his weekly chosen forty hours talking to the animals that live there. The knocking woodpeckers in the surrounding trees are responded to by banging on the hood of his tractor. The bobcat he saw with a cub in her mouth made him wonder where the dad was. Or that time when he came face to face with a coyote. Rather than run, the beast started growling at him, so Bob bared his own teeth and revved his tractor, growling back at him until it turned and ran, sealing Bob’s position as king of this particular food chain.
Since I've started this project, I have found that people generally fall into one of two categories. Those who are looking for a connection, a back and forth, two people sharing myths and legends. Or those, on the other end of the spectrum, who are just looking for a place to lay their story, and any personal input from me is seen as an intrusion and mostly ignored. Bob belonged to the latter group and would stare at me when I added my two cents, the quiet pause of a bad smell, before moving on. So I zipped up and left Bob to steer the ship. From the animals in his kingdom, he took us to the kids at the school. For the most part, they were good kids, he said, although there are some who would tell him to do his job and go pick up the trash. To this, he shrugged, their opinions not seeming to matter much to him. His main job at the school was to manage the sports area, so he was able to somewhat regain his authority by chasing away all those who seemed to be hanging around there for the wrong reasons. He usually knew which kids belonged there and which didn’t. Pointing over to the bathrooms, he proudly told me how clean they were and made sure to always keep the doors open so that no one could sneak in there to smoke a cigarette.
Photographs snapped, and a story told, I said my farewell and went to join the ladies for a drink. A couple of them had seen me creeping through the grass, something they did not find themselves doing on a regular basis, and were interested in knowing what I was doing! Common ground was once again found at the bottom of a glass of wine.
With practice coming to an end, we went back to the high school. As we walked from the parking lot to the field, we felt something behind us and turned to see Bob and his tractor closing in fast. Laughing at us, he cackled that he was in stealth mode before sweeping past us on his way to keep an eye on the next wave of athletes entering his sports fields.
Many people question my sanity for doing club sports, and honestly, when you take a break from drinking the Kool-Aid, it does feel a little like we are getting punked! And yet here we are on a typical school night, which otherwise would have had me making dinner and barking at my kids to do their homework, finding myself instead wading through flowers and chatting to suburban cowboys on tractors, while Dotti runs around playing a sport she loves under a fading pink sky. If you squeeze the coal hard enough, you will find the diamond.
Speaking of which, it turns out the invisibility cloak was a success, crawling in the grass did not embarrass my daughter, she didn’t even know I was there! Neither Dotti nor her teammates ever knew I was searching for fairies just beneath their feet.
